On 11/29/05, Isaac Gouy <igouy / yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Do you have any evidence for
> 1) How much Smalltalk caught on
> 2) How much Ruby has caught on?

Well if you ask the average grunt programmer born and raised on C++ or
Java about Smalltalk or Ruby he or she will probably just say "What?"
But I think there is a greater chance that person has heard of Ruby,
especially because of all the noise about Rails lately.

While certainly not scientific, a Google search for "smalltalk"
returns about 4.8 million results, whereas a search for "ruby" returns
41.8 million. Now you might scoff and say "well ruby is also a
precious gem." OK, then let's try "ruby language": 7.1 million
results. Using "smalltalk language" returns 2.1 million. As another
comparison, "java language" returns 70 million results, "c++ language"
returns 26.1 million and "python language" returns 22.2 million.

Overall a Google search seems to be a pretty good indicator of
language popularity, so Ruby is 3.5 times more popular than Smalltalk.

Ryan